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As the U.S.’s extremist blockade on Cuba pushes the country to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has said that the world has entered a “new era of depravity” in which such actions are ignored by world powers due to the heinous precedent set by the Gaza genocide.
“This is what we’ve seen with Gaza — this is a new era of depravity opened up, where there used to be, or there was this stated commitment on human rights that innocent civilians were almost exempt from the rules of war, from blockades,” Ocasio-Cortez said in brief remarks to Drop Site reporter Julian Andreone, filmed by Migrant Insider editor Pablo Manríquez on Monday.
“What has transpired is that now it’s kind of become acceptable that the entire Western world will look the other way as they starve and deprive a people because they find political actors or political regimes in that country to be objectionable,” she went on.
This week, Cuba ran out of jet fuel as a result of President Donald Trump’s recent escalation of the U.S.’s oil blockade on the socialist country. Air Canada announced Monday that it is cancelling flights to the country as government officials say that airlines won’t be able to refuel on the island due to rationing.
If the sanctions aren’t lifted, this will have devastating impacts on Cuba, which has already undertaken other emergency measures in recent days like reducing school hours and limiting fuel sales to ensure there is energy for hospitals and other vital facilities.
The UN has warned that Cuba is on the precipice of humanitarian “collapse” if the U.S. doesn’t lift its oil blockade — in a country that has already long struggled with an energy crisis brought on by decades of a devastating U.S. embargo. The embargo, imposed almost unilaterally by Washington since the Cold War, has cost Cuba anywhere between an estimated $130 billion to over a trillion dollars.
Last month, Trump called Cuba a “failed nation,” and the U.S. is openly angling for its longtime goal of regime change through strangling the country’s economy and devastating life for the 10 million people who live there. The U.S. is taking extreme measures to enforce its oil embargo in the region; on Monday, the Pentagon announced that it seized a supposedly Venezuela-linked oil tanker in the Indian Ocean, after Trump announced last month that the U.S. was cutting Cuba off from oil from Venezuela, its biggest supplier.
“What we’re seeing here is the possible precipice of hospitals running out of fuel. We’re talking about innocent children and women that could be put in harm’s way,” warned Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s incumbent upon all of us to defend human rights no matter where they are.”
The situation is indeed similar to that in Gaza, where the U.S. has aided Israel in imposing a near-total blockade of water, energy, fuel, food, and other humanitarian needs amid its genocide — and an extremely tight blockade on such resources for years before that. Israel’s famine campaign alone has led to the deaths of countless Palestinians, experts say, representing one of the most extreme instances of using starvation as a weapon in recent history.
As the U.S. and Israel have led and continue to carry out that campaign, even under the guise of a “ceasefire,” world powers have looked the other way, as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out. The total impunity for the genocide is ushering in the collapse of world order, with the U.S. positioning itself at the helm of a new system where only power speaks, and unfettered brutality is the new currency.
“AOC is right. Gaza was not just a genocide,” wrote analyst Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. “As I pointed out at the time, Israel’s goal was to destroy much of international law and the norms around the use of force in order to make increasingly inhumane use of violence and coercion against CIVILIANS permissible.”
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